INTO THE LOUNGE

Greg Kot, Tribune rock criticCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The telling moment came during the first encore. Steve Nieve was hunched over his grand piano, Elvis Costello stood at the microphone, a piece of paper--sheet music? lyrics? a prop?--in his left hand. Nieve played florid cascades of notes, Costello belted as though a Broadway role were at stake. It was a scene straight out of the living room of George and Ira Gershwin, two collaborators cranking a tune that's gonna knock 'em dead, kid.

As his 1994 kiss-off "All the Rage" makes clear, Costello isn't the alienated rocker he was in 1977. Instead, he's staking out a '90s version of the tradition embodied by the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart and countless others. He's a songwriter beyond idiom, and at times he's a singer who sounds like he'd be more comfortable in a lounge than a rock arena.

Which may explain why he headlined the relatively intimate Park West on Saturday. There he performed a career's retrospective of tunes--as well as an earnest version of the standard "My Funny Valentine"--over two hours accompanied only by Nieve, his longtime accompanist in the Attractions.

At times, Costello's eagerness to showcase his voice--an instrument that has become increasingly powerful and confident over the years--verged on shtick. There were the long, applause-teasing held notes and no fewer than five songs that concluded with Costello walking away from the microphone, still singing, as though rehearsing a video for Sinatra's "Songs for Swingin' Lovers." All he needed was a cigarette and a trench coat slung over his shoulder.

The crowd ate it up, and Costello indulged them with we're-cool, they're-not jokes at the expense of everyone from U2's Bono to Andrew Lloyd Webber, which conveniently overlooked that the singer himself was equally prone to the broadly etched mannerisms of those he had just mocked.

Yet when Costello got down to business, mostly on a stunning version of "It's Time" that concluded the first set, the singer more than justified his formidable reputation. He built a strong case for his latest album, "All This Useless Beauty," which includes a handful of tunes that, cleared of the cluttered production flourishes that have marred recent albums, stand up to his best work.

Costello, even at his most congenial--as he was at this performance--does not mince words. Instead, he slices and dices them, tosses out allusions, puns and cryptic jokes, and--wink, wink, nudge, nudge--assumes his audience will be able to keep up.

Mostly these references go unspoken, but in this looser context, Costello felt free to elaborate upon some of them, as when he segued from his "Oliver's Army" into the Pretenders' "Kid" into the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody" into Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind," before cracking up.

Less giddy but more impressive was the way he brought together Hank Williams' "You Win Again" and Smokey Robinson's "Tears of a Clown" out of "Allison." All the while, Nieve was bombarding the audience with an adroit mixture of nuance and bombast, filigree and fire that suggested a cross between Thelonious Monk and the crowd-pleaser at the piano bar on Rush Street.